


Aboard the Nemesis

by Nemesis_Zero (Ravager_Zero)



Category: Nemesis (Boardgame)
Genre: Action, Gen, Other, Science Fiction, Survival Horror, game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 06:47:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17575925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ravager_Zero/pseuds/Nemesis_Zero





	Aboard the Nemesis

Harsh, blurry lights swam before Tamara’s eyes. She was sick. Her eyes wouldn’t focus. She leaned sideways and vomited on the deck beside the pod. Hibernation—cryosleep—did things when reawakening. She staggered froward from the pod, tripping against something on the floor. Something red, and bluish, cold, but soft. She blinked and squinted, trying hard to make her eyes focus on the object laid across the deck. She knelt down to get a closer look.  
  
“Ari… no…” They hadn’t been close, but it was still shocking. Whatever had killed Ari was inhumanly strong—only half of the her body was in the hibernatorium. Mara swallowed against her rising gorge, extricating Ari’s shotgun from her long-dead hands. If there _was_ something else on the ship, she sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere unarmed. Everyone else was still in their pods, and the telltales showed no one else had awakened in a long time. Mara checked the date, then checked Ari’s pod again.  
  
Three days.  
  
Why hadn’t the ship’s systems woken all of them?  
  
Then she looked back at the hibernatorium, and the second and third set of biers. Some of those pods were empty. Maybe there were others that had been awoken. _Or was this an inbound run?_ The mental fog from cryosleep was a curse. Mara returned to her pod, looking at what was left of Ari… there was some stringy blue goo covering Ari’s jacket, and her rig looked like it had tooth marks in it. From what, Mara really didn’t want to know. Returning to her own pod, she clipped on her OMS headset and thumbed her evacuation key. Both were inoperative, and the ship’s engines were all giving nonsensical error codes. That would have to be the first check—an attempted jump with damaged engines could destroy the ship in an instant.  
  
Making sure the safety was off, Mara took the corridor aft, starboard side. That was the fastest route to the engines. At least it had been, last time she could remember being on the ship. The cryosleep SunDrop used often had some strange effects pertaining to memory. This time the route led through the showers. The hatch slammed shut behind her, making her jump. Lights flickered on and off ahead, and she could just see racking and lockers in the next compartment. Moving slowly against the kink in the corridor, she couldn’t help feeling that something was watching her.  
  
In the storage area there was a scout drone on the workbench, its camera panning and tracking to follow her around the compartment. Its batteries showed close to full charge. It didn’t seem like Ari had used it at all, despite how useful it would be figuring out what was wrong with the ship. Mara flipped the drone to stow position, then clipped it to the back of her rig. Entering her override code on the nearest weapons locker, she hoped there was something useful inside.  
  
Grenades… but on this ship… she shook her head. The e-charge was far more useful, immediately powering up the OMS and giving RCS status over the entire hull. All green. Whether or not the main engines would fire long enough was another matter entirely. But she could easily check that, the corridor to engine #3 clearly labelled on the far side of storage.  
  
The engine room itself wasn’t large. In fact, with the workbench, tooling, and exposed drive conduits it was almost cramped. It would also be a lot of work to check the drive status manually. Or she could simply plug in the diagnostic cables from the OMS headset and use that. All telltales glowed green, and the system boot sequence initialised without fault. _Good. But we need at least two engines to give us enough power for another jump_. Feeling better, she turned back to storage, intending to check engine #2 through the portside corridor.  
  
Something fell, rolling noisily across the deck. The lights flickered, falling across something that wasn’t there. Something that should not have been possible. Out of the corner of her eye she just managed to catch a glimpse of it as it rushed towards her—but where it hit her she felt nothing but a sense of cold dread. Dread, and a chilling certainty that this was what had killed Ari. The thing turned back, jaws agape but soundless. Mara held her ground and fired, superheated plasma and green-orange ichor splattering the bulkheads. The thing screeched—a noise that went beyond noise, becoming something almost psychic.  
  
Racking the slide, Mara felt needle fangs sink into her hand, almost dropping the shotgun in shock. She hadn’t even seen the thing move. One handed, and glad Ari’s weapon was energy based, Mara fired again. The plasma pulse seemed to ripple around the thing, leaving a white-hot welt with glowing edges in the bulkhead behind it. The shotgun’s telltales blinked red as it ejected the e-charge. She turned to run and those fangs sank into her left wrist. With a desperate cry she swung the empty shotgun around, knocking the thing’s jaws loose.  
  
She ran, heart pounding, skidding to a stop in front of the diagnostic panel for engine #2. Somehow it was still live, but disconnected from the shipnet. It was also bad news, because the drive itself was damaged—and judging by the claw marks, the thing in storage was responsible for it. She was still waiting for it to appear from the corridor to storage, but there was no sound at all. The damage to the drive was significant, but the automated repair routines could easily replace almost the entire drive. The equipment would just be stupidly loud.  
  
Which might just work as a distraction, if she could time it right. If the trail of blood from her hand didn’t give her away. And if it was only sound that drew that thing towards her. A lot of ‘if’s. Mara took a deep breath, tapping the activation key for the repair systems. The gantry overhead clanked and whined to life, but she didn’t wait around to see it work. She was already running for the portside hatch, hearing strange not-footsteps as the thing seemed to half-walk, half shimmer/slide into the engine room.  
  
The hatch behind her slammed down with such force that the ensuing echoing silence seemed otherworldy. Even the noise of the repair system was impossible to hear through the armoured hullmetal. That, at least, was one advantage of serving on a mining ship. Mara moved slowly through the corridor, seeing the armoury light up at the far end. There was a half-drained e-charge out of the racks. She grabbed it loaded the shotgun, already searching for the rack of e-charges in the cage. At least one was fully charged. Clipping the e-charge to her rig, Mara eyed the hatch behind her warily, moving slowly towards the bow of the ship.  
  
The lights flickered and died, the screens displaying nothing but static. Engine control. She shivered. If she’d headed portside first she would have found this room and been able to check the engines without needing an active OMS headset—and without encountering that _thing_ in storage. She still had no idea what it even was, other than an intruder onto the ship. It moved strangely, as if it wasn’t quite there—yet the raking fangs were certainly more than solid, and the blood dripping down her wrist was warm and terrifyingly real.  
  
Only now, with a moment to catch her breath, was it all sinking in. Ari was dead. Something was on the ship. It was strong enough to rip someone in half. It might even have been strong enough to damage hullmetal. She shivered. In the distance she heard a hatch mechanism working. A readout blinked for attention on her headset.  
  
ALL BULKHEADS OPEN  
  
She swore, trying to keep it _sotto voce_. Already she could hear the intruder moving—or not moving. There was sound, but enough for something that large. Not nearly enough. But the sudden name seemed to make sense. _Intruder_. Something from outside—perhaps even outside reality—breaking through into this dimension. Into this ship. Mara shivered again. She wasn’t superstitious about ship names, and the pay had been too good to refuse, despite the rumours about this being a cursed ship.  
  
The _Nemesis_.  
  
The name seemed almost like an omen now. Ari dead, the hibernation chambers malfunctioning, the engines somehow damaged by the jump. And now, perhaps, the things that had been causing it. Mara prayed it was just the one. One was enough. She unclipped the recon drone from her rig, sending it through the hibernatorium and back through the showers, circling past engine #3 and then forward. The drone’s searchlight played over a large ring console with a massive ship schematic on it. A big red button covered each major zone. Damage control and fire suppression.  
  
Massive claw marks were raked down the length of the console, and it looked like acid had eaten through manual activation for the reactor’s SCRAM control. The view from the drone spun wildly around before dissolving into static, making Mara jump. She was standing in the middle of engine control. Miguel had to have stashed something useful in this place. A datapad in a rack under the main console. A datapad with the schematics for the ship’s network of ducting, pipes, and technical corridors. Which meant a shortcut to the bridge. Well, close to the bridge.  
  
She slung the shotgun over her shoulder, collapsing her rig at the same time so she could fit into the technical corridors. It was tight, and she knew she was making far too much noise—because it seemed Intruders were attracted to noise. Loud noises, inhuman monsters, and being stuck in a tight space. She froze, breath coming in short, sharp gasps. _I am_ not _going to die in here_. She scrabbled forward, checking the plans on the datapad one more time. There should have been a ventilation grate immediately to port.  
  
A little further up the corridor, so cramped she had to lie on her back and kick the grate out once she was past it. She landed heavily, drawing the shotgun and trying to cover the room like she’d seen Carlson do it. The flashlight on her rig was enough illuminate several cabinets covered with a green cross, and turning around she saw the gurneys in the middle of the room. Emergency room, well stocked because mining accidents were almost always horrific when in the void.  
  
Sparks cascaded from the ceiling panels, and in the sudden flash Mara saw what looked like a trail of slime over the monitor and keyboard of one of the autodocs. She moved to investigate, because the trail was far too small for the Intruder she’d seen to have made, and it seemed too continuous to be drool. There also wasn’t enough splatter for it to be blood—but she had no idea how far Ari had managed to move through the ship, or what she’d been trying to do.  
  
Working by the light one her rig, Mara searched through the lockers against the bulkheads and under the consoles. There was a disturbing—and incredibly suspicious—lack of supplies. Near the hatch to the bridge she found a small first aid kit. A proper medikit would have been more useful, but at least she could disinfect the wound on her hand before dressing it with some gauze and the short strip of bandage remaining. The bite on her wrist was disinfected, at least.  
  
A countdown flared to life on her OMS headset. The ship’s AI had just locked in another FTL jump. If she wasn’t back in cryosleep before the jump there wouldn’t be any point to surviving against the Intruders. And that was assuming the the malfunctions hadn’t affected navigation. Mara eyed the corridor in front of her warily. The bridge appeared to be empty, the navigation console showing green status on the engines. She turned the light on her rig off, then inched cautiously through the corridor, into the bridge.  
  
The nav console showed Ari’s login, but the coordinates were set to deep space. Mara frowned. _What the hell were you trying to do, Ari?_ Something clanged in the distance, seeming to echo through the entire ship. Mara held her breath, shotgun wavering between all three hatches to the bridge. Nothing happened. She let out the breath she’d been holding, moving back to the infirmary.  
  
It seemed to appear out of nowhere, as if the space in the compartment had somehow folded in on itself. The colour was wrong, different and outside the normal spectrum, but somehow exactly the same as the first Intruder. Mara fired, the plasma pulse washing over and through the Intruder before leaving a glowing crater in one of the medical lockers against the opposite bulkhead. The shotgun ejected the spent e-charge.  
  
“Shit.”  
  
Mara fell backwards, somehow managing to unclip the spare e-charge from her rig. She rolled frantically aside as the Intruder’s tail spikes punched clean through the deck plates where her head had been. It was already over her, claws ready to strike. There was one chance. Mara engaged the OMS through the headset.  
  
The Intruder flew back and slammed into the bulkhead leading to the stern of the ship. Mara slid along the floor, her boots denting the front of another medical locker. The force of the thruster burn almost tore the shotgun from her hands. Everything not fixed to the bulkheads or deck turned into deadly shrapnel—but she was in the shadow zone created by the gurney. Three seconds later the burn ended.  
  
Still on her back, Mara racked the slide and fired a blast of raw plasma at the face of the Intruder. Its skin seemed to melt, and odd coloured burns covered the sides of its head and shoulders. It screamed beyond audible register, but she still felt its pain. She racked the slide again, time seeming to slow as the Intruder lurched forward, huge scything talons tracing a shimmering arc through the air. She squeezed the trigger, watching as the superheated plasma tore the Intruder’s torso in half, throwing its attack wide and leaving its legs stumbling for another split second.  
  
The shotgun ejected the spent e-charge, but she really wasn’t paying attention. Her eyes were fixed on the talon embedded the deck plating only millimetres from her ear. So close, in fact, that it had managed to catch her hair. Hard. She took the utility knife from the side of her boot and cut the offending tangle next to the talon. It took some time to catch her breath, but as she did so she was mentally cataloguing everything broken or damaged in the room, figuring out how easy it would be to fix one of the autodocs.  
  
It took some time, swapping a few logic boards between the autodocs, and changing out a couple of fittings the diagnostics showed as damaged or useless. Ten minutes. Ten very tense, very quiet minutes. But in the end there was a working autodoc, and gritting her teeth against the pain as nanites and undifferentiated stem cells swirled around her hand, Mara watched as bones re-set, blood vessels were re-laid, and skin knitted itself together. In an earlier time it would have been a miracle, or magic. Now it was so commonplace it was part of basic first aid.  
  
Of course, you still had to be alive, and whole, to make use of it. An autodoc could even reattach a severed finger or toe. Anything larger still needed real surgery. Where it might be on the ship was still a mystery. Mara sat on the edge of a gurney, trying to make sense of the ship’s layout, different from the trip out due to the cargo requiring certain compartments to be shifted. That was sometimes a curse with mining vessels. They all looked the same outside, and had the same general internal layout, but it was the specifics that would trip a person up.  
  
Like the fact that the compartment aft and coreward of the infirmary wasn’t the comm center but airlock control. Mara jumped as sparks shot from one of the lighting panels overhead, then an echoing, rattling clang came from the technical corridors. Scanning each of the hatches to the infirmary, she slowly re-set the autodoc to heal the bite on her wrist. The diagnostic showed worse damage than she’d thought—the bones were chipped, and a tendon had been severed. The nanites required a crew override to attempt repairs that deep. The autodoc still advised her to find the surgery for a proper healing procedure.  
  
Mara keyed in the override, watching the jump countdown in the OMS headset as she waited for the autodoc to finish. If the countdown had started when she awakened from cryosleep, then it was essentially half over now. There was still a lot left to do; setting the coordinates for Earth, searching the rest of the ship, and sending a signal that the ship had been attacked by Intruders. That last would be for Marscom, not SunDrop. Mara had a sick kind of suspicion that SunDrop already somehow knew about the Intruders—but sent ships out anyway, because of how profitable the MD crystals they mined were.  
  
A muffled thud sounded somewhere aft, towards airlock control. _Not going that way then_.  
  
Stowing the autodoc unit, Mara rose and shuffled quietly towards the bridge. Her shotgun would need another charge before she could fight off another Intruder. At least the navigation console was quiet. Quiet and easy to use, if a person knew what they were doing. Marscom hadn’t inserted one of their best pilots into the Nemesis crew without good reason. But the crew had to make it to Earth, not Mars. That was the other reason she had been placed onboard—Marscom needed incontrovertible proof that SunDrop knew about the Intruders and was sending ships out into the Oort cloud to mine the MD crystals the Wanderer without proper protection or sufficient resources to protect the crews.  
  
Mara moved through the hatch directly aft of the bridge. The sight took her breath away. _This_ was not a standard berth on _any_ ship. At one point it might have been bulk stores, or a comm hub, or even a rec-deck. Now it was covered in slime and trailings that seemed to just out of phase with the walls, almost like bad clipping in an old video game. The colours, too. The same not-colour as the Intruders. Five eggs were scattered about the compartment, four surrounded by some kind of creeping mass against the decking, the fifth just somehow _there_. That last egg wasn’t even attached to anything. At least, not through any dimension Mara could make sense of. Shivering, and more discomfited than she wanted to admit, she slunk from the nest and through the corridors to the next compartment.  
  
Hatch Control was stencilled on the bulkhead next to the main hatch. Only two of the emergency escape pods were showing up on the diagnostic. _That has to be a mistake_. Mara tried—and failed—to recall the crew manifest. The ship’s AI was also most unhelpful. They might have been outbound originally, with up to twenty souls onboard. Or they could have been inbound, with as few as three—a Captain, a scout, and a pilot. And now only two.  
  
“Damn it,” Mara swore. “I can’t just leave him here.”  
  
She looked back up at the displays. The entire system was on the fritz anyway. It would be better to try and find something useful in the lockers than attempt to repair the laundry list of malfunctions anyway. Her eyes lit up at the sight of the security locker. A prototype shotgun, sleek and deadly, and much better than what Ari had been using. Only charged enough for a single shot, but from the diagnostics panel it seemed like it would have much greater damage potential.  
  
New shotgun in hand, Mara moved quietly from hatch control to airlock control. There had to be something useful in there. Well, sort of. A fire extinguisher. Heavy and unwieldy, even with the rig helping her to support it. She led with the shotgun through the next corridor. She whirled as the hatch slammed shut behind her. Something raked across the back of her rig, shredding the back panel of her jumpsuit.  
  
She turned, shotgun ready. The report echoed through the evac chamber, energised flechettes grazing the side of the Intruder as it seemed to shift through an impossible angle to somehow surround her. She swung wildly with the shotgun, but somehow hit nothing. A massive hand materialised beside her head, claws leaving ragged slices down her cheek. Overhead a damaged pipe burst, spraying both of them with some kind of coolant fluid.  
  
Mara turned, already spying the exit hatch to the backup evac chamber. The Intruder was already in the way. She dodged to the side, and at least succeeded in surviving the attack—the fanged maw tore a chunk from her side and breast instead of her neck. She stumbled the rest of the way into the backup evac chamber, making enough noise she couldn’t understand how the Intruder wasn’t following her.  
  
Battered and bloodied, she sank down against the bulkhead opposite the entrance, trying to catch her breath. The autodoc was at the other end of the ship, there weren’t any medikits left in the racks here, and something near the bite felt like it was moving inside her. She tasked the rig to run a diagnostic scan on her, hoping it wasn’t what she was afraid of. The scan seemed to take forever, but didn’t identify any foreign bodies. It did, however, identify three broken ribs and a punctured lung, along with massive soft tissue trauma to her breast.  
  
At this rate she would be happy with _surviving_ the trip back to Earth. She could settle for missing pieces if she was alive. And to stay alive meant she needed ammunition for her weapon. The flickering light didn’t make searching the supply racks easy. But it was almost like the backup evac chamber had been stripped clean by a previous crew. Possibly with good reason, because both escape pods were gone. Some sort of holo-echo device flared to life, then fizzled to nothing. Behind it was a full e-charge. A full e-charge meant a full shotgun. Mara slammed the charge home and watched the indicators flicker back to green on the shotgun’s display. She felt a lot better about surviving.  
  
The OMS headset flashed an urgent alert as the ship’s AI sounded over the intercom. “Fifteen minutes to jump. All crew report to the hibernatorium for cryosleep initiation.”  
  
Mara continued aft, limping slightly, and moving as cautiously as possible. The ship itself was groaning as structural members were stressed and unloaded by the RCS thrusters firing to align the ship for the jump. The noises echoed throughout the ship, and she hoped that would be throwing off the Intruder currently stalking her. The next compartment after the backup evac chamber was eerily familiar.  
  
The Nemesis schematic on the center console gave it away, as did the large red buttons over each major sector. On top of a bulkhead console lay scattered pieces of composite and steel casing from a recon drone. She was still feeling slightly faint, something feeling deeply wrong about the wound from that bite. She swung out a stool and sat, ordering her rig to run another diagnostic. The results were exactly the same. And she still needed to scan the compartments on the port side of the ship, just to check if anyone else might have been awakened early—or fallen to the Intruders like Ari.  
  
Moving corewards from damage control, Mara had her back against the bulkhead lining the corridor to the showers. It didn’t matter that it was slow going, the ship was making enough noise to be a distraction for the Intruders in its own right. Especially the intercom. “Blue Alert. Ten minutes to jump. All crew report to the hibernatorium for cryosleep initiation.”  
  
Once she was in the showers, Mara opened the nearest locker, looking for anything useful, anything she could use to dress her wounds. Something fell from the top shelf, rolling across the deck. She knelt and grabbed it before it could get too far, holding it up to the light. A mil-spec stimpak. Almost pure adrenaline. And almost completely useless against the Intruders. She put the stimpak back on the shelf and checked the next locker. A half-empty medikit—but at least the bandages were still there. She stepped into one of the stalls and disengaged her rig, stripping off her ruined shirt so she could bandage her chest and side. It didn’t feel that much better, but at least it helped stop the bleeding. She zipped up and engaged the rig again, hearing an odd shuffling scrabble in the lockers.  
  
Shotgun in hand, Mara stood back and keyed open the noisy locker. The larvae inside launched themselves towards her, fangs first. Energy flechettes turned the cat-sized monsters into green-orange paste. The colour of the ichor still looked wrong. Shaking her head, Mara turned towards the hibernatorium.  
  
“Critical Alert. Five minutes to jump. All crew must begin cryosleep initiation.”  
  
“I know,” Mara swore under her breath.  
  
The cryopod lid hissed open, beckoning with what she hoped would be an uneventful jump home—because surely the Intruders couldn’t survive the G-loading caused by the FTL drive. Something shimmered in the cloud of vapour behind the pod. Something that had just folded through an impossible angle and appeared out of nothing. Only the cloud showing the silhouette of its true form as it impinged upon this reality. Its claws seemed to shimmer as it swung out.  
  
Mara leapt back, but she already knew it wouldn’t work. Those claws raked across her thighs and down the outside of her left leg. She dropped to her right knee, feeling faint from the pain. The Intruder seemed to swim in her sights. The program couldn’t resolve the target. She pulled the trigger anyway, a massive spread of flechettes draining the e-charge completely. Bleeding from dozens of puncture wounds, the Intruder advanced, scenting its prey.  
  
“Critical Alert. Two minutes to jump. All crew must begin cryosleep initiation.”  
  
The Intruder turned, hunting the noise. Mara screamed and swung the empty shotgun like a baseball bat. There was a sickening crunch as the alloy and composite case stoved in the skull of the Intruder. It shrieked beyond register, one clawed hand pawing at the air as it surged from the hibernatorium. Mara let out a quiet sigh of relief. Then regret. The port side of the ship was still unexplored—she just had to hope any previous crew had already abandoned ship in those missing escape pods. And even though it was empty, she stored the prototype shotgun in the equipment rack next to her pod.  
  
The lid closed and the cyrosleep sequence began initialising. The only thing she could think about was the Intruders, and the G-load from the FTL drive. It would kill them. It _had_ to. It wasn’t like they could survive that…  
  
…could they?  
  
The world turned black and the ship jumped. The carcass in the infirmary folded away through another dimension during the jump. The ichor washed itself into subspace. The only evidence anything had happened were strange plasma burns and bullet holes around the ship—and the confessions of a pilot that might not be completely sane anymore.


End file.
